Tale of a Marathon and Its Guiding Hand

Run For Your Life

The New York City Marathon is one of those institutions that seems to have always been around. Every November, throngs of runners gather at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and crowds of spectators line the route that snakes through Brooklyn and the western edge of Queens before dipping into Upper Manhattan and the Bronx and ending in Central Park. A new documentary, “Run for Your Life,” offers a salutary and touching reminder that the race, like nearly everything else great about New York City, was largely the creation of an odd, stubborn visionary.

Until his death from brain cancer in 1994, Fred Lebow was more than just the director of the race and the president of New York Road Runners. He was a fixture of city life, instantly recognizable for his skinny frame, neat beard and ever-present cycling cap. An immigrant from Romania (where he was born Fischl Lebowitz) with a background in the garment business, Lebow helped turn running from a solitary and eccentric pursuit into a major sport and a staple of American culture.

Photo

Fred Lebow in 1990. He was the longtime director of the marathon before his death in 1994.Credit
Steve Freeman/Associated Press

He did this with a mixture of showmanship, quasi-evangelical zeal and entrepreneurial hustle. Using on-camera interviews with friends and colleagues, and archival film and video clips, “Run for Your Life,” directed by Judd Ehrlich, is mainly an affectionate portrait of the man, whose every foible and virtue is noted with fond tolerance. The film, which is being released simultaneously on DVD and in a Manhattan theater, also offers a history of the marathon, from its beginnings as a sparsely attended four-lap race around Central Park through its apotheosis as a wellspring of civic pride and corporate sponsorship.

Along the way, moments of glory are recalled — Alberto Salazar’s world record, Grete Waitz’s nine victories — along with a few episodes of ignominy, without which this would hardly be a New York story. I’m sure Lebow would have been just as glad to forget the name Rosie Ruiz, who traversed most of the course in a subway car in 1979, but viewers will probably be amused by the memory of the scandal she caused, or tickled to learn of it for the first time.

The film’s words and images also create a time-lapse picture of New York’s renewal, a transformation that Lebow, without necessarily intending to, surely helped along.

In the mid-’70s, when the marathon became a high-profile, five-borough event, the city was suffering from a crisis of order and morale that seems almost inconceivable now. In that context, sending thousands of people in shorts on a Sunday jog through the streets must have seemed marvelously mad. But now, with the specter of hard times before the city again, the race is a marvelously reassuring fact of life.